Chapter XXVI
continued… to read the opening, click here.
Certain aspects of my water system took care of themselves. The pipe that fed my toilet tank, for example, leaked at the same rate my body processed fluids. This meant that I could put a bucket under the leak during one pee, and by the time I was ready to eliminate again, there would be enough water in the bucket to flush the toilet. I was extremely proud of my tiny, symbiotic ecosystem until I mentioned it to my friend John, who crushed me by boasting that he saved even more water by peeing into his sink.
Sadly, not all water-related elements of my life were as easy as the self-sustaining flush bucket. Because I was training basketball for between two and five hours a day, I needed to drink a huge amount of fluid. Sometimes I was able to afford a very cheap, salty Polish sparkling mineral water—I know it doesn’t sound tasty, but I loved it—but most of the time I had to make due with the free stuff. It was one of the chief miseries of my life to get home and discover that I didn’t have enough boiled and cooled water to slake my thirst. On these occasions I’d have to either spin a glass of tap water on the table (acting as my own centrifuge, you see, a measure which was effective only in the most imaginary sense,) or stand over my boiling pot dipping out mugs of hot water and trying to suck them down as fast as possible. This wasn’t quite a four-alarm emergency in the winter because I could cool the water with snow, but let me tell you, it was a drag. There are very few things less fun than being extremely, extremely parched on a hot day and having to slake your thirst with boiling water dipped out of a pot.
Another water problem was laundry. While the idea of washer/driers and Laundromats had hit Cesis during my residence, the actual machines had not; thus, I had to wash my clothes by hand. (Can you imagine the sheer volume of disgusting, sweaty socks five hours of basketball generates?) My laundry system consisted of boiling a pot of water (obviously,) combining it with a pot of cold water and throwing everything into the tub. I’d then refill the pot, put it on to boil again, and climb into the tub with my clothes. I’d first wash myself, getting the water all nice and soapy, then I’d agitate and wring out my garments. I was in phenomenal shape at the time, and as I washed my shirts and socks I used to wonder if I was the only person in the world using his washboard abs as an actual washboard.
I have mentioned before that one of my favorite things about living overseas was the way the mundane things in life became imbued with a sense of adventure. One of the best examples of this phenomenon began, naturally, with a glass of water.
I’d been living, happy, if a little lonely, in my new place for about a month. Winter was no longer just threatening to arrive, but had dropped off its suitcases, made a mailbox key and claimed a spot in the toothbrush holder. Finding the blankets that came with the furnished apartment somewhat coarse, I had taken to sleeping in my super-sub-zero sleeping bag—and even so I still got chilly at night.
One morning I awoke early, poked out an arm-sized hole in the air-tight seal of my sleeping bag, and snaked my hand out in search of my water glass. My fingers encountered the glass and I brought it carefully back towards the sphincter in the bag, attempting to extend my just my lips out from the warmth in order to receive refreshment. I tilted the glass back, and then farther back, and then still farther back, but no lovely trickle of hydrating h2o reached my parched mouth.
“Something wrong,” I thought muddily as I reclined to consider the situation. My bare arm, still extruded from the bag like the antenna of a mindful snail, was beginning to sting with the cold, and, although I could feel the weight of a glass of water at the end of it, no degree of incline had yet proven sufficient to coax the water from its container.
I threw caution to the wind and turned the glass upside down, bracing for the cold splash against my hand. It did not arrive. Glass and water remained indivisible, a solid chunk of water and vessel.
“Frozen,” I thought, my hypothesis confirmed. I dropped the glass, withdrew the arm, and cuddled it inside my gortex and goose down pouch while I considered the situation. The initial problem, thirst, was now relegated to the background; the more serious issue was that lying there in my sleeping bag I was probably the warmest and most comfortable I was going to be all day—perhaps even for several days—and I knew enough about Latvia, and life in general, at that point to recognize the moment I broke the seal of warm comfort I would become inexorably involved in retracing the landslide of SNAFUs that had culminated in my water freezing.
I could have been content to lie there a while, cuddling myself and stoically staving off reality, but water had decided to give it to me from both ends that day: In a grim, unavoidable irony, I realized that not only was I thirsty, I had to pee.
I rolled my whole assembly to the edge of the bed and swung my legs over the side. I braced for impact, withdrew my upper torso from the bag, then shuffled over to where I kept my clothes. Maintaining bag seal, I pulled on a t shirt and a sweater, then with the speed of a surfer plunging for the first time into the waves on an icy day, I yanked on a pair of pants, some socks, and then some more socks. Then, I put on some more socks and tried touching my feet to the floor. Horrible, but survivable.
After attending to my body’s water needs (Weak. So pitifully weak.) I ascertained that the radiator in my bedroom was malfunctioning. I checked the radiators in the living room and kitchen. They were still working. However, even with all three appliances going full bore it was always pretty damn cold in the house and now it was bordering on unlivable. Here in the US, it would have been the kind of situation where you’d call the gas company or the 24-hour heating guys and they’d be legally obligated to show up at your house within an hour to make sure no one froze to death. In Latvia however, we weren’t so concerned with providing the creature comforts. I decided that I was here to experience life on the Latvian level, and, as I was young, strong, and possessed of a super sleeping bag, I’d ride the thing out as best I could—kind of like a grown up version of a child “camping out” behind the living room couch.
The first thing I did was seal the bedroom door by duct taping rolled up towels around the doorway. As I said, it was always pretty damn cold in the house anyway, and even with this limb tourniquetted it was now 33.33333% colder than that. It wasn’t quiet freezing, but it was cold enough that I unplugged my fridge and stacked my food on the kitchen table—a cost-cutting measure equivalent to about a week’s worth of sink pees.
I was pretty satisfied with the emergency steps I’d taken. I’d be cold, of course, and uncomfortable, but I’d survive, and wouldn’t this be an amazing adventure to write home about or include later in my memoir? Confident as I was, it did occur to me that it would be nice to know how long this situation was fated to last—sort of like a marathon runner looking forward to the next mile marker—so I went downstairs to talk to my neighbor.
My downstairs neighbor was snoopy old woman who never left her flat. The only reason I even knew the place below mine was occupied was because she used to crack open her door every time anyone left or entered the building and then slam it shut again as soon as she saw who it was. I reasoned that someone who appeared to do nothing other than keep abreast of what was going on in the building might know what was going on in the building, so I went downstairs and knocked on her door.
All babushkas are old women, but not all old women are babushkas. To me, there is a certain kind of pluck to the babushka—a hustle. The babushka is a busy person. She is busy sweeping the gutters or selling shopping bags or making boiled potatoes, and nothing must stand in the way of her duty. The babushka is a juggernaut in a headscarf—she is goal-driven, and if you are standing in front of, or even sitting in, the seat on the bus she has decided she desires, she will remove you by either kindness or a kick in the pants. (The role of the bus seat in the babushka economy, I should mention, is so fundamental that calling it bedrock is selling it short. Bus seats do not equate to “dollars” or even the “money” in the babushka’s world, they are closer in true meaning to the wholesale concept of “value.” The babushka sees bus seats the way a koala looks at eucalyptus leaves or a whale looks at krill; they aren’t the only things in the world, but they’re the only things that matter.)
My snoopy neighbor lacked the moxie that characterizes a true babushka, but she was single-minded in her task of cataloging the comings and going of the building’s residents. Whether I left or came home at 8 in the morning, 12 in the afternoon, or well past midnight, she would pop her door open, cast a suspicious eye on me, and then slam the door shut. I had formed an idea that she kept a pegboard by the door and would move a little icon labeled “The American” into the In or Out position depending on which way I was going. I had also noticed that there was a perpetual smell, like boiling meat, emanating from somewhere near her place, and I hoped that by knocking on her door I might be able to confirm the presence of a large cauldron of rendering mutton tallow in her apartment. I hoped to find this home tanning operation, distasteful as its presence might have been, because if my hypothetical cauldron did not materialize the second most likely source of the smell was that someone had shit in the hallway. (Think of the savings!)
My breath crystallized and hung in the air before me as I beat my gloved hand against her door. I had to hit the door quite hard because Latvian apartments almost always had two front doors back-to-back. There would be one door that faced the outside world, and then, closing to within inches of that door, would be a second, no less sturdy door, with its own set of locks and peepholes. I smashed on my nosy neighbor’s outer door for a while and got no answer. This was annoying because based on my past experience there was no possible way she was not home.
Reasoning that she was busy tending her mutton pot, I turned to the single force in the universe I knew was guaranteed to produce her. I retraced my steps up the staircase, counted slowly to 10, then opened my door as if I were going outside. As I suspected, my neighbor was compelled to answer this summons—she couldn’t let her in/out pegboard get out of whack—and when I saw the door open I sprang forward and addressed her.
“Hello!” I said quite loudly into the crack in the door and the eyeball that filled it. I watched as the eyeball darted about, seeking an easy escape or a way to deny its own existence. Finding none, it summoned a mouth from somewhere in the depths and this orifice issued what I presumed to be an uncharacteristically cheery, “What?”
In deference to my neighbor’s apparent love of brevity, I replied simply, “Radiators?”
“Yes,” the mouth admitted, the eyeball above it rolling exasperatedly.
“Yes?” I pressed.
“Kungi bus,” the mouth said. This meant, “Men will be.”
Oh, well that solved everything! If “men would be” I had nothing to worry about, did I?
I relate the reply above, “kungi bus,” in Latvian above because it gets at the innately brusque nature of the language. “Men will be” is not simply a direct translation of the words “Kungi bus.” It is, I believe, also an accurate one. This is not one of those cases, as when you’re watching a Japanese film, when an actor makes three gruff sounds which end up translated: “His majesty’s armies rise and set upon the silver seas like a thousands suns. The kings and lords of other lands are as dust upon the sleeve of his majesty’s silken garbs. Does not the jasmine please his Majesty’s senses this fine morning? Tea?”
To a mind steeped in the English language the sentiment, “men will be,” needs some softening. How would we cushion this blow? We’d probably go with something like, “There are guys coming by,” or “a repairman’s on his way.” But we must remember, the English language presents an affluence, a richness, a glut, a wealth, a stockpile, a surfeit, an excess of vocabulary unlike anything the world’s ever seen. English is an incomprehensibly expansive piece of open-source freeware that’s being modified and nurtured by some three billion people on a daily basis. Latvian, on the other hand, is barely spoken by half the people who actually live in Latvia (the rest speak Russian.) It is not outlandish to guess that more people take their first English class every day than have ever read or spoken a word of Latvian in the history of the world, so we can’t really expect the tongue to have acquired the flourishes and semantic courtesies of English.
Given all these elements, when my neighbor said, “men will be,” she meant it. The paucity of vocabulary had crystallized, as it often seemed to, into a paucity of thought, and “men will be,” meant “men will be,” no more and no less, and I would have to like it or lump it.
I lumped it.
I lumped it back upstairs to my apartment, reflexively boiled some water, and sat down to find out just what kind of time span “will be” encompassed.
It turned out to be about 30 minutes. I was pulling on more socks when I heard a knock at the door.
“The men!” I thought. “They are!”
I opened the door, or rather, doors, to find an oily pair of overalled handymen–one lanky, one fat–regarding me grimly.
“I think he’s a foreigner,” said Lanky to Fatty in Latvian.
“I am,” I confirmed in Latvian.
“Tell him we’re here to fix the radiators,” Lanky instructed Fatty in Latvian.
“Blahblahblahblahblah,” Fatty said to me in Russian.
“I don’t speak Russian, but I do speak Latvian,” I told them in Latvian.
“We… fix!” Fatty said to me in Latvian, but with a German accent.
“Yes, please,” I returned in Latvian with an American accent.
I was remarkably used to having this kind of conversation. It was inconceivable to most Latvians that anyone would learn their language, so as soon as they identified you as a foreigner they’d hit you with Russian and German no matter what language you used in return. In this case, Lanky had a few words of English, and, unconvinced that I understood the situation, he elected to deploy them both.
“We…” he began, his grimy hand tracing an arc that suggested whatever information he was about to convey should be considered in a general sense, “hot.”
“No.” I countered. “No hot.
“Yes. No hot.”
“Yes.”
Having established that, he broke into a wide grin, laid his hand demurely against his chest and admitted, “English, no.”
“English no. Hot no.” I observed, and we all had a good laugh.
I took The Men Who Would Be by the wrists and lead them into the bedroom. There was a long round of vigorous nodding when they discovered the radiator was in there. Lanky knelt and laid his palm against the blackened ribs of the malfunctioning unit. He stood back up and said, “It’s off,” to his partner.
He removed the nub of an unlit, filterless cigarette from his lips, looked at it, and put it back in his mouth. Then he bent down and checked the radiator again. Oddly, his routine with the cigarette had not changed the heat situation. Somewhat annoyed he said, “it’s off,” again. Fatty, the apprentice, watched and learned.
It was becoming clear to me that this radiator repair wasn’t one of those ones where you move the switch from the off to the on position and everything’s jake, so I started getting ready for work. I was hopping around, trying to minimize skin/air contact, when Fatty popped up and said, in Latvian, “This is going to take some time. We need the key.”
Say what you will about the Soviets—no seriously, say it, I’ll wait—but they virtually obliterated petty theft. Now, I’ll grant you they did this primarily by pre-stealing everything of value and dividing it amongst themselves but that cavil aside, they did keep people from robbing one another. I was once playing a basketball game in the school gym and left my wallet, cash inside, on the home team bench. The wallet sat there for a whole afternoon, over night, and all through the next day until the following evening. I figure about 700 people must have passed through the gym during that time, but when I returned not only hadn’t the wallet been stolen, it hadn’t even been touched. Beyond simply not stealing it, no one even looked at it and thought, “You know, someone’s going to steal that. I better go turn it in.”
I did deliberately take my most prized chattels—my watch and my walkman—with me when I left the men in the house and headed for school that morning, but that was because I feared they’d blow them up, not steal them.
I only taught two classes that day, so I told The Men I’d be back at around 11:00. They assured me multi-lingually that the radiator would be fixed by then.
A couple hours later I was walking home, fine-tuning my contingencies for surviving a heatless night, when I got my first clue that my radiators might not yet be chugging out the BTUs. I was making my way down the long, long Cesis hill, employing the mincing ice walker gait that so quickly became second nature to any resident of Latvia, when I espied Lanky and Fatty making their way in my direction.
I was initially gladdened by this sight; although it was slightly puzzling that the L&F Radiator Repair vehicle had been left at the jobsite, I figured if they’d knocked off this early the repair must have been a simple one. As I drew closer however I realized they were so drunk they could barely walk. Lanky, as always, was taking the lead, weaving back and forth across the pavement, while Fatty clung to his waist and followed him like a child playing Blind Man’s Bluff. Lanky had somewhere acquired a very handsome gilt picture frame, which he was wearing around his neck, and although I stared expectantly at the duo while they stumbled by, they took no notice of me.
“Kungi nevareja.” My neighbor informed me when I entered the front door and caught her peeking out. Men couldn’t.
“But don’t worry,” she said, neatly tripling her single day average for word output, “they’ll be back on Tuesday.”
Aghast, I checked my watch to confirm—it was Tuesday.
I learned a lot that week. I learned that if you really want to accomplish a major project—say you want to shoot an extra 500 free throws per day; or try every restaurant in town; or set the record for watching consecutive showings of the film The Glimmer Man by yourself at the local cinema, all you have to do is shut off the heat in your apartment for a week in the dead of winter.
Luckily, the temperature that week never got below about –5°. I stayed away from home as much as I could and then, when I was forced back to my quarters, I’d either wrap myself in my sleeping bag or sit in a hot bath reading until it was time for bed.
It was strange. I could not necessarily claim to like The Men Who Would Be, and yet I looked forward to their return with an eagerness so acute that it ached. I suppose this must be similar to how an inmate in “The Hole” feels about the guard who brings him food—he hates the guard, of course, the guard is the reason he’s in “The Hole” in the first place, and yet, the guard means so many things: food, a notch in the passage of time, human company, a diversion…
When Tuesday finally rolled around I was ready to greet The Men Who Would Be with open arms. They did not disappoint. They did not, I need hardly state, fix the radiators that day, but with an admirable sense of urgency they managed to get drunk before 11 am—which expedited the whole process—and also performed a tandem plunge down the staircase that consumed a row of mailboxes in its fury.
I was in a larval state that evening, hermetically sealed in my sleeping bag with a book and flashlight, when the phone rang. Phone calls to me were akin to bus seats to babushkas at that time. The only phone calls I ever got were from family members and since there were no such things as answering machines in Latvia at the time, the fact that I remember seriously considering not answering the phone must indicate that I was extremely cold. The call, when I made it to the phone, turned out to be from Principal Ulmanis, who was ringing to personally to assure the radiator would be fixed the following day.
My confidence knew bounds.
The next morning, however, promptly at 8 am, The Men Who Would Be appeared at my door as scrubbed and sober as a pair of chastised schoolchildren apologizing to the whole class. They smacked so resolutely of a recent dressing down I could nearly hear Ulmanis’ words echoing off them, and there was, I had to admit, a welcome “All Business” air about them as they greeted me.
Lanky solemnly pointed to himself, then to Fatty, and then swept everything off an imaginary table with a powerful stroke of his arm.
“Izlabots bus,” he said. Fix will be.
Truth be told, at least a part of me believed Lanky when he said this. The change in attitude was apparent not only in the men’s demeanor, but also in the fact that they had brought tools!
It had not occurred to me before, but as the men began to wheel in a series of sinister-looking, greasy compression tanks, I realized they had not carried any tools with them on their prior visits. They set up the tanks in front of my ailing radiator and began, with the greatest earnestness, to generate an enormous cloud of viscous, purple smoke.
As I abandoned them to their work I had no doubt my return would reveal one of two outcomes: The radiator would be fixed, or the men would be dead.
Cresting a rise in the hill on my way home I scanned the horizon for mushroom clouds. Finding none, I looked down the road as far as I could, attempting to spot the men staggering drunkenly along, but did not see them. “This does not mean,” I cautioned myself, “that they haven’t simply caromed off into a ditch somewhere out of sight,” but even so I felt a tiny ray of hope warming my heart.
As I rounded a final stand of grey pine trees my apartment building became visible. I was relieved to find that it hadn’t been reduced to a sheet of nuclear glass, but as I stood there I finally understood what all those movie characters mean when they describe a scene as, “Quiet. Too quiet.”
I hastened into the building.
I have been calling my building an “apartment building” but if you are conjuring images of glassy lobbies and doormen, let me set you straight. The entranceway to the building was an open, concrete bunker-like space. There were windows, but no glass in them, and it was unpainted. If I showed you a photograph of the “lobby” you would probably think it was the skeletal foundation of building under construction rather than an inhabited dwelling. Because it was just as cold in the hall and stairways as it was outside, I could not gauge whether the heat was on until I got into my apartment.
My neighbor, when she cracked her door to catalog my entrance, seemed to be swaddled in heavy rags, but then, she was always swaddled in heavy rags, so that wasn’t much of a clue either.
I paced up the stairs as if I were sneaking up on my own apartment. I unlocked the doors as quietly as possible, then flung them open as if to catch… I don’t really know what. Everything inside was pretty much as I’d left it, minus the smoke. The Men Who Had Been had opened the windows to air the place out.
“That was thoughtful,” I mused, going from room to room shutting the windows and sending kind thoughts to Lanky and Fatty wherever they were. At last I came to the bedroom and stood in front of the radiator. Because the windows had been open and because I’d just come in from outside, I couldn’t tell without directly touching the radiator if it was working or not. Optimistically savoring the moment I removed my glove and bent down to apply the test.
It was ice cold.
“God! Damn! It!” I vented, delivering a splintering blow to the offending appliance. “What about the canisters? The smoke?”
As I looked around for something small and unimportant to smash against the wall, I realized that I was now the unlucky inhabitant of an unheated apartment in the middle of a Latvian winter in which the windows had been left open all day.
“I can’t believe they didn’t do anything!” I lamented. Then I immediately felt guilty.
Didn’t do anything? I thought. Really? In only three visits Lanky and Fatty had avoided fixing the radiator numerous times, destroyed a row of mailboxes, become severely intoxicated twice, filled my apartment with smoke and acquired a handsome picture frame. Who was I to call this nothing?
I took a deep, icy, cleansing breath and decided to focus on the positives. After all, The Glimmer Man had to complete its cinematic run soon, and spring was no more than five months away. This cheered me up considerably, so I put my gloves back on and headed out to buy a bottle of vodka. On the way out the door I flipped the burner on under my water pot. I thought I might take a nice hot bath when I got home.
Wow. This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever read… or written. Loved it!